Married legal team Liz and Jack Sutherland have a successful family law practice and a house on Hope Street near San Francisco, where they live with their five happy children (one with special needs). Liz and her children's lives are changed forever when Jack is murdered on Christmas Day. In the year following the murder, Liz struggles to come to terms with the loss of her husband, both personally and professionally, and is dealt another devastating blow when her eldest son has a near-fatal accident.
Sarah Anderson, a beautiful, successful thirtysomething attorney, is having a midlife crisis. She's become a workaholic, spending 60- to 70-hour weeks at the office, and she is involved in an unhappy relationship with a man she only sees on weekends, who refuses to involve her in any other aspect of his life. She lives in a dumpy apartment, which contains the same furniture she used in college, and she has no outside interests other than the sometime boyfriend and her job.
Added by: JustGoodNews | Karma: 4306.26 | Fiction literature | 23 May 2011
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The War of the End of the World
The War of the End of the World is an impossibly ambitious book which nevertheless succeeds completely, and in the process confirms that Vargas Llosa deserves to be considered among the great authors of all time. Unlike his other books, which are either frankly autobiographical or significantly based on the author's personal experience, this is a straightforward historical novel, taking place in 1890s northeastern Brazil. It is also a real novel of ideas, confronting very seriously such timeless topics as the relationship of individual to society and of faith and personal belief to law and social order
It is the dawn of World War II, and Neville Chamberlain believes he has bought "peace for our time" from Adolph Hitler, who has just seized Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The English are alarmed by the huge German army, while the soldiers that would defend London don't even have steel helmets. For many, compromise and appeasement seem to be England's best defense.
It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'.
